Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/639

Rh one; the writing part of the scheme is, moreover, impossible for a child who has not yet learned how to write. There is another method which consists in seizing at once upon the most striking aspect of the subject, and which shall make the most vivid impression upon the imagination. For this purpose the leaf is the least useful, the flower the most so. The earliest botanical classifications are based upon the corolla, and, in accordance with a principle already enunciated, a child may often best approach a science through the series of ideas that attended its genesis. The conditions are different for an adult, who requires to get the latest results; the child's mind is always remote from these, but often singularly near to the conceptions entertained by the first observers. Again, it is unnatural to enter upon the beautiful world of plants by the study of forms and outlines—which is much better pursued when abstracted from all other circumstances, as in models of pure mathematical figures. But with plants comes a new idea—that of life, of change, of evolution. It is fitting that this tremendous idea make a profound impression on the child's mind; and this impression may be best secured by watching the continuous growth of a plant from the seed. The study of life is a study of events, of dynamics, of catastrophes. The earliest observation perceives the extraordinary influence of the surrounding medium upon the destinies of the living organism. It is not difficult to surround these destinies with such a halo of imagination as shall impress on the mind a sense of the mystery, sanctity—I may add, the necessary calamities of life—before it has become absorbed in the consideration of living personalities.

I trust it will not seem a piece of bathos when I add that I initiated the pursuit of these objects by making the child watch the growth of seven beans on a saucer of cotton-wool. A specimen bean was first dissected, and its principal parts named—the cotyledons, the embryo with its radicle and plumula, the episperm. The daily reference to these terms speedily rendered the child quite familiar with them. To seven other beans were given appropriate names, as of a band of brothers, and they were then planted on cotton-wool by the child. A daily journal of events was opened, in which I wrote each day or two, at the child's dictation. As she had learned the Arabic numerals, she inserted these herself in the protocol whenever necessary. The entire history of each bean was thus written out, and the successive steps of its development, from the thrilling moment when the radicle first peeped out, to the time when, after transplantation to a flower-pot, the plumula had developed to a long, trailing vine. The rate of growth of this vine was measured day by day exactly, with a rule, the number of leaves counted, etc. But the mathematical considerations were here subordinated to a larger idea, that of the succession of events. Some of the beans molded early in their career, and the relations of this catastrophe to the accidental differences of position, moisture, etc., were carefully studied. On one occasion the child dictated to me the